This paper aims at contributing to the field of ship design by introducing new systematic variation methods for ship hull forms. Hull form design is generally carried out in two stages. The first is the global variation considering the sectional area curve. Because the geometric properties of a sectional area curve have a decisive effect on the global hydrodynamic properties of ships, the design of a sectional area curve that satisfies various global design conditions, e.g., the displacement, longitudinal center of buoyancy, etc., is important in the initial hull form design stage. The second stage involves the local design of section forms. Section forms affect the local hydrodynamic properties, e.g., the local pressure in the fore- and aftbody. This paper deals with a new method for the systematic variation of sectional area curves. The longitudinal volume distribution of a ship depends on the sectional area curve, which can geometrically be controlled using parametric variation and a variation that uses the modification function. Based on these methods, we suggest a more generalized method in connection with the derivation of the lines for a new design compared to those for similar ships. This is the so-called the volumetric balanced variation (VOB) method for ship forms using a B-spline modification function and an optimization technique. In this paper the global geometric properties of hull forms are totally controlled by the form parameters. We describe the new method and some application examples in detail.